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Hi Folks! Nothing too profound this week, and my apologies for not posting yesterday. I’m fighting a massive cold right now, and at some point today or tomorrow I’m going to have to brave the Great White North long enough to dig my driveway out of the 25+ cm of snow that Mother Nature was kind enough to deliver us yesterday. {wry grin} And I’m not even a skier! Oh well, I’ve got some friends that are pretty happy the hills will be great for snow-boarding and skiing.

A couple of small changes have been made to the website. The RSS feed now exports the entire article in the RSS description field, so the whole blog should be viewable now in aggregators and mobile readers. I’ve tested it with Jpluck on my Treo and it works beautifully. Please let me know if it’s not working on other platforms.

The other change I’ve made isn’t really visible. I’ve added “geo-tagging” to the meta-data on the headers for each web page. The way the Internet works is that search engines find content and index it by keywords. If you have keywords on your site that help the search engine physically locate you (i.e. Ottawa, Canada), then when someone in Ottawa types something into Google like “Palm training Ottawa”, then it stands a chance of locating me in Ottawa, as opposed to someone doing training in the US, or Italy, or somewhere else. Google, and many other search engines, are now testing “local searches”; basically, find what I’m searching for that is actually close to me. Say you’re searching for “pizza” – you don’t want to be ordering from Luigi’s in Italy, when you live in Ottawa… it’ll be kinda cold by the time it gets there! So, by adding geo-tags to my website, I’m telling search engines where I’m physically located, so when someone from Ottawa searches for Palm trainers, consultant ants, etc., it’ll be easier to find me. Similarly, if you are not in Canada, you won’t be getting me listed first on your rankings if you’re looking for someone local.

I see a lot of traffic to my website from many different countries around the world, and I’m flattered that so many people are coming by every Monday to read my blog. Feel free to send me your comments; there’s a contact link on every blog story. See you next week!